THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS

At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.

This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:

Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.

Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.

Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.

(Click the ‘comments’ link below if the input box does not appear)

10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”

Where is that “persuasive scientist who can connect and convince… because he preaches apocalypse in simple, overwhelming terms”?

Let’s dress James E. Hansen up in a white robe with maybe a purple turban and a clip-on white beard (and an inspirational choir of young girls in the background singing the Mother Earth hymn) and turn him loose on the public.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF0bg1T763A

..and Monbiot is back at Guardian Environment, possibly the Messiah that Peter Preston was pleading for. Potentilla and I have both had a go on thecoments thread. (We’re snowed in here on the Mediterranean coast. I’d invite Brute over, but I don’t think the French would survive the shock).

Monbiot is back at Guardian Environment, possibly the Messiah that Peter Preston was pleading for

No. He’d look too baby-faced in that white robe with the clip-on beard. Besides, he’s no scientist. I think we need a seasoned guy like “coal death train” Hansen. He’s about due to retire from his government job at NASA GISS, so could be available.

Something about being “a menace to French society” and “the definition of the ugly American”……… Insisting that Filet Mignon be cooked “well done” and demanding a bottle of catsup seems to have offended more than one snooty French restaurateur………Their loss…… Funny, I had the same reaction in Quebec.

By the way, did you know that major cities in both Britain and Germany (and throughout Europe) were bombed mercilessly during World War II but not a single bomb fell on Paris? (Just an interesting anecdote…)

Also interesting in that it only took German forces 5 weeks to conquer the entire country………pretty much could’ve done it in four weeks but it was raining……………the Germans ran through the French so quickly that they outpaced their supply lines and had to slow down…………also, dealing with the French troops that surrendered without firing a shot hampered the pace.

Yeah. The you-tube clip of the Mother Earth hymn is a bit psychedelic.

But if you get a choir of pretty 18 to 20 year-old girls in white robes singing it softly in the background behind Swami Hansen as he warns sternly of “tipping points” and eternal damnation caused by human CO2 transgressions, it should help sell the story.

But if you get a choir of pretty 18 to 20 year-old girls in white robes……… Everybody likes a pretty young face, right?

Max,

In my younger days I was drawn to those type girls as they were “free spirits” and “Liberal”………Shall we say, “less discerning” with their physical generosities……know what I mean? The Hippie chicks were fun.

Thank God I never married one of those kooks…….they were all head cases.

Steady on with this anti-French nonsense – note my surname. Remember Napoleon? It took the combined forces of Europe to bring him down – and his legacy is still everywhere. Anyway, were it not for the French, the US might still be a British colony.

Oh no … according to this article in the Financial Times, Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate change, thinks the world “will almost certainly fail to draw up a new treaty on climate change this year”. As the FT observes, this delivers “a heavy blow to the barely flickering hopes for a swift global ­settlement”. But wait – she goes on to say that forging the treaty (the one that wasn’t “forged” at Copenhagen) “was more likely to happen at a follow-up meeting next year in South Africa”. So that’s all right then – and, best of all, the circus rolls on.

And there I was innocently thinking that Copenhagen was the “last chance to save the planet”. Now it can wait until 2011. Phew.

The Weekly Standard, like the Wall Street Journal is a very Right Wing publication owned by Rupert Murdoch.

The position of both journals, like the UK’s Sun and many other papers in Australia reflects Rupert Murdoch’s own personal prejudice. Nothing more.

Incidentally, I remember reading that the guys from RealClimate had invited the WSJ Journalist’s over to see and discuss their work at NASA, but the word back was that they had been forbidden by Rupert Murdoch from attending.

The Guardian had a great piece yesterday – here. Written I’m ashamed (but not surprised) to say by a lawyer, it argues that the lesson to be learned from the CRU disclosures is not that scientists should be more open and honest – no, the thing is not to get caught in the future.

We went to Corsica on our honeymoon and got lost in the mountains in the car. We started to get a little nervous when we realised the signposts had been defaced with bullets. A really beautiful island though.

OK, so Napoleon was a Corsican (incidentally, I agree with TonyB: Corsica is a most beautiful island … although the cuisine is rather limited) but Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette (best known as Lafayette) was most certainly a Frenchman. And, without the support of such brave members of the French aristocracy, the colonials would have had a harder time shaking off the cruel British yoke.

Neither the Guardian nor BBC are run by powerful individuals, or traditional newspaper families, but instead through Trusts.

The Guardian, according to their Wiki entry, is ultimately owned by The Scott Trust, a charitable foundation existing between 1936 and 2008, which aimed to ensure the paper’s editorial independence in perpetuity, maintaining its financial health to ensure it did not become vulnerable to take overs by for-profit media groups.

I’ve really nothing against the idea of running a newspaper for profit. What’s more worrying is that powerful people like Murdoch and his allies run their papers, which are usually loss making, as influentially mouthpieces promoting their political influences.

Its important that institutions like the BBC and the Australian ABC should be allowed to continue. TonyN has campaigned against various BBC editorial decisions he’s disliked and which is of course fair enough. There’d be no point in his complaining to the likes of Murdoch about anything that’s obviously incorrect in the Sun or WSJ !

It is interesting that you feel that the Guardian is a ultra-leftist newspaper.

It actually represents, politically, but certainly not unconditionally the majority of UK voters. That is those who vote for either the Labour Party or the Liberal Democratic Party.

You ask me to read the article in the Weekly Standard and comment on it. There can be no doubt, looking at the cartoon cover, that it is scientifically incorrect. Murdoch knows that to be the case and yet he still publishes even though there are many qualified scientists who would help him get it right for no cost at all. But, Murdoch doesn’t allow any dissent in his newspapers.

It actually represents, politically, but certainly not unconditionally the majority of UK voters. That is those who vote for either the Labour Party or the Liberal Democratic Party.

I would suggest that you refrain from presenting as fact opinions on a topic you obviously know very little about. The Guardian has a fairly low circulation in the UK compared to the other dailys, and it has a highly specific target market, specifically the “middle/upper middle class left leaning crowd”. Frankly if you want to judge by circulation and likely core labour voters you’re better off looking at “The Sun”.

I’m a scientist but not a climatologyist. I develop the background science of global warming on my web site, and I find that the biggest fraud is in the basic science. Here’s a page which I recently produced:

Narrative on Absurdities

As critics become more influential and credible, the absurdities of the global warming claims are increasing rather than decreasing. This situation calls for a perspective narrative.

Warmists are getting more rudimentary in focusing on the heat producing effects of carbon dioxide and linking all adversities to the result. By rudimentary, I mean they do less explaining, because their claims are becoming less credible.

The absurdity is that carbon dioxide has no ability to add significant heat to the atmosphere. Yet even most critics claim that it does—the only question being how much. What is it about this absurdity that even the critics can’t see through it?

It’s difficult to see into other minds and explain what their problem is. There has not been a consistent description of how CO2 creates global warming. Monckton reviews dozens of descriptions that have been given, all in conflict with each other.

The promoters of the error seem to think there is something unquestionable about CO2 creating heat. Since CO2 absorbs radiation, it must create heat. Since nitrogen and oxygen do not absorb radiation, they must not create heat. So the claim is often made that the planet would be icy cold without greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

The reason why these assumptions are so preposterous is that all surrounding realities contradict the conclusion. But the promoters of the error seem to have no ability to add related factors to the subject.

The first and most obvious contradiction is that more heat enters the atmosphere through conduction and convection than radiation, which is recognized by all alarmist climatologists. They all have so-called energy budgets, which are put in chart form showing heat flowing in every direction; and conduction and convection always show more heat flow than radiation.

Presumably, such climatologists would never make the claim that the atmosphere would have no heat in it without greenhouse gasses; but they never correct the persons who make that claim. And it is often scientists who make the absurd claim. The claim is generally made by The Union of Concerned Scientists and by government bureaucrats.

Such a basic absurdity as claiming nothing but greenhouse gasses add heat to the atmosphere shows an extreme mindlessness. You would think that when someone points out the errors, they would get corrected; but it doesn’t happen. This is why critics refer to the warmist position as a religion rather than science. It follows the same pattern of belief-overriding-rationality as creationism.

Then critics/skeptics seem to assume that CO2 must add some heat to the atmosphere, even if not all of it. They will often go through the same calculations as the warmists showing the resulting heat following a logarithmic curve. How do you get a point on a curve, when the amount of conduction and convection cannot be quantified? They aren’t just saying you might get something within a particular range depending upon the influences of conduction and convection; they are saying there is a mathematical certainty to the result. It shows that even on the side of critics there can be a high degree of mindlessness involved.

Another absurdity, which seems to be too complex for the mindless nature of the subject, is that the temperature of the atmosphere is not determined by the amount of heat entering it but by an equilibrium with the amount of heat leaving. That equilibrium cannot be accounted for in the mindless calculations. Supposedly, a laboratory model can account for the rate of heat leaving the system, but the atmosphere is so vastly more complex than a laboratory model that no one could honestly claim it can be represented by a purified system.

If the rate of heat leaving the system were accounted for, it would show that the temperature of the atmosphere must be locked into a narrow set of requirements to achieve equilibrium, because rate of heat loss is determined strictly by temperature of the emitting material. You cannot get CO2 adding heat to the system, when equilibrium requires a fixed temperature. Equilibrium holds the temperature of the atmosphere fixed by resulting in more radiation escaping until the required temperature is reached. The temperature of the atmosphere follows a gradient with height, but the net result must be fixed by equilibrium requirements.

To claim that carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas is like setting a jar of pickles on the kitchen table and saying it absorbs heat, therefore it heats the kitchen; and if you remove the jar of pickles, the kitchen will be as cold as the outdoors. The truth is, heat gets into the atmosphere a hundred times faster through conduction and convection than through radiation. This is why fans are used to cool electronic devices instead of relying upon radiation.

It’s irrelevant whether heat enters the atmosphere through conduction and convection or radiation, because the resulting temperature is controlled through equilibrium dynamics. There is no log curve for the result. The result doesn’t change, so where does the curve come from?

Firstly it not that CO2 ‘creates’ heat. It doesn’t. It slows down the process of IR radiation from the Earth’s surface causing the surface to become warmer. The natural GHE has been known since the middle of the 19th century to be resposnsible for a 33 degC warming.

The process is pretty much analagous to how clouds keep the Earth warmer at night. This is especially noticeable in Winter when a clear night is a good indicator of deep frosts.

Its not all down to CO2. H2O plays a major part too.

You need to read up on what people like Roy Spencer, who is generally considered to be more sceptical than most scientists on the AGW issue, has somewhat reluctantly to say on the topic. But he’s absolutely correct.

You say “To claim (for example) that the WSJ presents a biased report, because Rupert Murdoch owns it would be absurd”

Why absurd? Why sshould the WSJ be any different to the Sun or Australian?

If Rupert Murdoch decided that the WSJ should take a different line on the science of Global warming, for instance, do you think it would take more than one email or phone call to the editor and journalists ? And do you think they’d have any problem with that ‘request’?

Gee Pete, the Editor in Chief of the Guardian seems to be a Greenie according to Wikipedia (which you so often represent as gospel).

I wonder what the view of the reporters would be seeing that their boss is a committed Eco-Zealot?

Alan Charles Rusbridger (born 29 December 1953 in Northern Rhodesia) is the son of the late G H Rusbridger, the Director of Education of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He has been editor of The Guardian since 1995.

Career

He is a member of the board of Guardian News and Media, of the main board of the Guardian Media Group and of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian. He is executive editor of The Observer, a visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London. Since 2004 he has been Chairman of the National Youth Orchestra. Despite the Guardian newspaper being loss-making [1], Rusbridger is one of the best-paid newspaper editors in the UK taking home £471,000 in pay and benefits in 2008/9

Campaigns

Mr. Rusbridger supports 10:10, a British climate change campaign for a 10% reduction in carbon emissions in 2010, per “4-11″ September 2009 Guardian issue.

Again, I’m teasing ……………Lafayette was an invaluable aide to Washington, although I often wonder how “determined” the French would have been had they not been at war with Great Britain at the time.

This quote sort of says it all………

American Revolution
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as “de Gaulle Syndrome”, and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; “France only wins when America does most of the fighting.”

- Hundred Years War
- Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare; “France’s armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman.”

- Thirty Years War
- France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.

Mexico, 1863-1864.
France attempts to take advantage of Mexico’s weakness following its thorough thrashing by the U.S. 20 years earlier (“Halls of Montezuma”). Not surprisingly, the only unit to distinguish itself is the French Foreign Legion (consisting of, by definition, non-Frenchmen). Booted out of the country a little over a year after arrival.

Panama jungles 1881-1890.
No one but nature to fight, France still loses; canal is eventually built by the U.S. 1904-1914.

Further to the post (49) by PeterM, I believe that the greenhouse theory, per se, is usually not questioned (as Roy Spencer writes). It is also generally accepted that Earth’s temperature at the surface would be around 33°C colder if there were no atmosphere containing GH gases (principally water vapor).

What IS questioned are the following· Importance of CO2 in the “natural” GH effect
· Impact of added human-produced CO2 on our climate
· Impact of possible “positive” and “negative” “feedbacks”
· Delayed impact of GH warming still “hidden in the pipeline”

These questions are critical to the validity of the premise that “anthropogenic greenhouse warming” (caused principally by human CO2 emissions) represents a serious potential threat.

PeterM (and the IPCC plus many climate scientists) believe that this premise is valid, although there is no empirical evidence to support this (only model simulations).

Others on this blog (including me) plus many other climate scientists do not believe that this premise is valid. We have asked PeterM (and others on other blog sites) to present the empirical evidence to support this premise. They have been unable to do so. They have shown evidence that it has warmed over the past 150 years, that Arctic sea ice has receded since satellite measurements started in 1979 (while Antarctic sea ice expanded), that sea level has been rising since the 19th century when tide gauge records started and that atmospheric CO2 has risen since measurements started at Mauna Loa in 1958. But they have not been able to provide empirical evidence to support the premise that “anthropogenic greenhouse warming” (caused principally by human CO2 emissions) represents a serious potential threat.

It is generally accepted that the impact of CO2 in the natural GH warming of our planet is between 3 and 7°C (out of the 33°C total).

It is also generally accepted that GH warming follows the change in atmospheric concentration in a logarithmic relationship, so that the doubling of CO2 from 280 to 560 ppmv would have the same temperature impact as a further doubling from 560 to a theoretical 1120 ppmv.

A doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated to result in a theoretical GH warming of 0.7 to 1.0°C. This level of warming is obviously not a problem for our environment or society. It is assumed that atmospheric CO2 will reach a level of about 560 ppmv by year 2100 (if the compounded annual rate of increase continues at the same level of the past 20 years). It is further assumed (based on ice core data) that the “pre-industrial” level was around 280 ppmv. Using the 2xCO2 estimate of 1.0°C, this means that the GH warming from “pre-industrial” year 1750 to future year 2100 would be 1.0°C. We are now at around 390 ppmv CO2, so (using the logarithmic relation) we have theoretically warmed by around 0.5°C since 1750, leaving roughly 0.5°C CO2 warming from today until year 2100.

This is obviously nothing to worry about.

And here is where the problems begin.

The IPCC and those scientists who support IPCC believe that the net feedbacks with warming from added water vapor, changes in clouds, etc. will more than triple the GH warming from CO2 alone, resulting in warming by year 2001 of 2 to 4°C.

These estimates are not based on empirical evidence, but on model studies, which have been fed various assumptions. In fact, recent actual observations (by Spencer et al. and Lindzen + Choi), which were published after the last IPCC report of 2007, demonstrate that the net feedback from clouds with warming is strongly negative, rather than strongly positive, as assumed by IPCC, resulting in a 2xCO2 GH warming of around 0.7°C with all feedbacks, or slightly below the GH effect with no feedbacks.

These results are being strongly contested by many scientists, who support the IPCC view.

There is another basic “problem” with the IPCC story on warming.

The “official line” says that all human-caused factors represent the same warming potential as CO2 alone (the other GHGs, land use changes, aerosols, etc. essentially “cancel one another out”), that all “natural forcing factors” are essentially insignificant (less than 10% of the CO2 forcing) but that 2xCO2 (with the assumed net positive feedbacks) will cause warming of 3.2°C.

On this basis, we should have seen 20th century warming of 1.3°C. But, in actual fact, we only saw around half of this amount. So, instead of reducing the assumed 2xCO2 GH impact to agree with the observed warming, the postulation is made that the other half of the GH warming is still “hidden in the pipeline”, from where it will eventually come out to cause additional GH warming of the atmosphere.

This bizarre assumption postulates that the “hidden warming” is “hiding” in the upper layer of the ocean, and will eventually be “released” into the atmosphere as added warming.

Due to the much higher specific heat of the top 500 meters of ocean than the entire atmosphere, this postulation does not pass the normal “reality test”.

But, even more importantly, it has been invalidated by the observed facts. This is the Achilles’ heel of the IPCC and the dangerous AGW premise: this premise is supported by model simulations and assumptions alone, but not by the physically observed empirical evidence.

The atmosphere (both at the surface and in the troposphere) has cooled after 2000, despite record increase in CO2.

At the same time, the upper ocean has also cooled since more accurate Argo buoys replaced the old, relatively inaccurate, expendable devices in 2003.

The latent heat in the relatively small amount of melting ice or added water vapor is too small to make a difference.

So where is the “missing heat”?

It cannot be found on our planet, so it does not exist and the “hidden in the pipeline” postulation is invalidated.

PeterM (plus many other AGW-believers) has a hard time accepting these hard and cold facts, because they invalidate the dangerous AGW premise he so much wants to believe in.

That sort of summarizes my take on the GH theory and its impact on our climate.

There are lots of other errors in the latest IPCC report, as is being shown by several recent revelations. There are others, which have not yet been picked up by the media. But that’s another story.

It was Admiral Pellew who lived in my home town who defeated the Barbary Pirates and destroyed their base of Algiers in 1820. White slaves had been taken from here by the pirates including one of Pellews descendants. I can see his house from my own and replica cannon from the battle are still present there.

I wrote a climate article which included reference to him, carried recently at TAV

Ironically the French destroyed large parts of my town without warning or cause in 1690. There is a place called French Street here which just a few months ago relinquished a cannon ball from the battle.

To continue this hopelessly O/T exchange, Brute might note that Admiral Pellew was British and (as Captain Pellew) commanded the ship of the line Conqueror at Trafalgar – defeating the, er, French. He was one of Nelson’s “Band of Brothers”.

Nonetheless, I consider Brute’s mild dismissal of the help given by the French in the Revolutionary War is ungracious.

But don’t forget Washington’s crossing of the Delaware (taking the dastardly British by surprise) – I seem to remember reading that that was almost thwarted by ice. An early example of Americans “defeating climate change” perhaps? Maybe there’s an object lesson there for Obama.

Please read comments 74-78 inclusive. We’ve done some work here in the past about possible outgassing amounts and it was suprisingly large. This isn’t reflected in the Mauna Loa ‘stairway to heaven’ figures but is in the highly variable historic records.

Beck has postulated that the extra CO2 that caused the high spikes came from the warming Arctic.

Without going into a major check of all the variables, the calculation looks right to me, using the 7% change in atmospheric CO2 per 1°C as calculated by Revelle and Suess (1957). This results in an increase in atmospheric CO2 of around 24 ppmv per 1°C warming.

Thanks for this. So assuming the increase of ocean warmth was sufficient-which certainly appears likely during that extended 1920′s to 1940 warming episode- the spike in Co2 we saw seems perfectly possible?

The other spike was in the 1840′s which comes right in the middle of the previous arctic warming episode I wrote about. All in all Becks calculations appear perfectly feasible.

Which of course doesn’t explain the linear-rather than erratic-increase we see in modern Mauna Loa figures. Any theories on that?

Which of course doesn’t explain the linear-rather than erratic-increase we see in modern Mauna Loa figures. Any theories on that?

I do not know how the Mauna Loa numbers are “adjusted”, “corrected” or otherwise “manipulated” to arrive at such a smooth curve (it’s so smooth that it looks “unnatural” to me, but that is subjective).

I once ran a comparison between annual human CO2 emissions and annually averaged increases at Mauna Loa. This comparison was very erratic, with the theoretical “percentage of human emission staying in the atmosphere” (i.e. amount of increased atmospheric CO2 in Gt over the year divided by the Gt of human CO2 emissions over the same year, expressed as %) swinging from under 20% to over 90% (and averaging a bit more than 50%).http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3051/3056843022_d1d107fb78_b.jpg

Since at least 1970 there has been a gradual warming, in Arctic as well as global temperature, at least up until recently.

It seems like the latest global temperature trends (for what they are worth) are showing cooling, both in the atmosphere (surface plus troposphere) and the upper ocean.

I have not checked latest statistics on Arctic temperatures, but assuming that these are also in decline, the theory says we should start to see a slowdown in CO2 increase (or even an annual decrease in atmospheric CO2).

Realize that there may be a time lag between ocean cooling and increased CO2 solubility leading to lower atmospheric CO2 content, but this should not be that long.

I am inclined to think that lag is around two years at sea surface level which increases to decades then centuries the deeper you go,

How much CO2 there is in the quick to react first foot or so of ocean I don’t know. Take into account biomass and soil and ocean and that should create considerable variation. I have never been convinced that as Mauna loa is measuring such a huge flux it should present such an unnatural linear increase

GALLUP: Credibility drops for global warming, scientists…Gallup’s annual update on Americans’ attitudes toward the environment shows a public that over the last two years has become less worried about the threat of global warming, less convinced that its effects are already happening, and more likely to believe that scientists themselves are uncertain about its occurrence. In response to one key question, 48% of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.